That Kate Hudson is running late does not come as a surprise. I've read about how her co-star Matthew McConaughey found her timekeeping exasperating on the set of How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days. That she rings to tell me in person, now that's a surprise. And when, about half an hour after she does arrive, she mentions that she is a keen Scrabble player, that comes as a surprise, too.
This may sound patronizing, given that the 31-year-old actress was accepted at New York University (which she turned down in favour of drama school in California), but the Scrabble does seem out of keeping with her image as a West Coast blonde, cultivated assiduously through various romantic comedies in which she plays, well, West Coast blondes -- sometimes feisty, sometimes dizzy, but always endearing, thanks to that beguiling smile she inherited from her mother Goldie Hawn. You know the one. It could melt an ice sheet.
As we order drinks I tell her I am still recovering from a preview of her latest film, The Killer Inside Me, made by the British director Michael Winterbottom. It is dark, lyrical and erotic, but also disturbing. (It was released in June but has yet to reach Ottawa.) Based on a 1952 novel by Jim Thompson, the film's protagonist (played by a mesmerizing Casey Affleck) punches his prostitute girlfriend (Jessica Alba) until her face is unrecognizable. In another scene, another of his girlfriends, played by Hudson, urinates in shock as she lies dying on the floor, following a horribly realistic blow to her stomach.
Some people have walked out of it, so shocking is its brutality. "I was shocked too. But I don't like watching myself on the big screen at the best of times. I hardly recognized myself in this one. I'd gained a little weight. I wasn't working out." Deliberately? "Yeah, because right before then I had been working out a lot and had become supermuscular, which I didn't like either. It wouldn't have been right for that part, I wanted to look plainer. Not glamorous. Small town. There is something kind of masochistic about her. She wasn't easy to empathize with."
Empathy is one of Hudson's favourite words. And something she reckons she is good at, as I discover when I ask if she is an empath. "Empath? That's a proper word? Someone who can empathize?" I nod. "I love that! As I entered my thirties I realized I was an empath. A noun."
This is where the Scrabble comes up. She disapproves of the game now allowing proper nouns. "But I suppose there are some nouns you don't expect to be nouns, like duplicity. That's a noun." (She's right, I checked.) "But try and put that in to a sentence. It's hard. It's like, ah, ah, let's see ... My duplicity made it difficult to focus on the task at hand. Hard word, right?"
Hudson has a five-year-old son, Ryder. Does it make her cringe to think he is probably going to watch her in The Killer Inside Me when he is older? "I normally take him on the set with me, but not for that one. 'Mummy is going to be naked on the bed, smoking and getting spanked in the next scene, honey!' I guess it will be weird for him when he does eventually watch it. I had to watch my dad die in films. I was 13 when I saw Backdraft and I was bawling."
By her dad she means Kurt Russell, who has been Hawn's partner for 27 years. (Her biological father, musician Bill Hudson, was absent from her life from the time she was an infant.) What about watching her mother in sex scenes? Doesn't everyone find it embarrassing to think of their parents, you know, doing it? "Not me. I always thought my mother was so damn cute!"
So it was a pleasure to watch her in love scenes? "I wouldn't go that far, but it never bothered me. My brothers might feel differently about it but, for me, I felt my parents laid it out for us pretty well. We always had a good perspective about sex.
When you grow up with parents in showbiz who are loud and funny and the life of the party, you get pretty relaxed about that stuff."
Was the bar higher or lower for her because her parents were part of the Hollywood establishment? "Well, for a while I felt I had to apologize for it, at the beginning of my career. I didn't want to talk about it. Cameron Crowe (the director of her first film) was asked by the press if he knew my parents when he cast me. He said: 'So what, it's like Goldie and Kurt turned up demanding I cast their daughter? It doesn't work like that.'"
That film was Almost Famous and she was Oscar nominated at the age of 21. It silenced any critics who might have accused her of nepotism. Perhaps her parents' influence was more subtle. She has a reputation for being an extrovert, "not a shy bone in her body" as one of her co-stars said. Where does this come from? "Not sure, but the older I get the more I am OK with it. When I was younger I felt I had to apologize for being so happy, for not seeing things in a negative way."
She is most confident, she says, when she is dancing (if you have seen Nine, you will know that she is pretty accomplished). "I grew up dancing. Nothing makes me happier than when I'm dancing. But going clubbing is not easy for me because of the commotion it causes. It becomes a joke for everyone now. Don't get too close, don't shake my hand, you'll end up in a tabloid."
Ah yes, the paparazzi. Hudson does seem to be a favourite target. A week after we met, there was speculation in the gossip magazines about whether or not she had had her breasts enlarged. And rarely does a week go by without tabloid speculation that she is pregnant, or too thin, or too fat, or too needy, or has been dumped, or has got engaged.
Has she developed a sixth sense for when a long lens is being trained on her? "I hate it. It's so invasive. I went through a phase where it really affected me. You know, there might be a picture of you with your butt hanging out of your dress and you think 'What has that got to do with my work?' But it's not just the long lens, it's what they say to you up close, the most horrible things, in front of my son. There have been days when I have been in three different tabloids, writing about me being in three different relationships, with people I haven't even met. It's that bad!'
The hardest thing must be when she falls in love with someone and then, when the relationship comes to an end and both parties are feeling emotionally raw and vulnerable, it is treated as entertainment. When she split up with Owen Wilson, her co-star in You, Me and Dupree, he tried to kill himself. She was devastated and they went back out with each other for a while before it fizzled out again.
"Exactly," she says. "There are things that should be left alone and not discussed in public, and that was one of them. The media does not discriminate between people who want that attention and people who just want to get on with their jobs."
She has been romantically linked, as the saying goes, with rock stars and sports stars, such as cyclist Lance Armstrong and baseball player and former Madonna squire Alex Rodriguez. But it is the actors who must make life complicated. "I usually stay away from actors. I don't know what it is but I'm not ..." she trails off. "According to the press I'm with every man on the planet. When we walk out of here you will be the man I was on a date with."
As well as getting an Oscar nomination at 21, Hudson also got married, to Chris Robinson, a former drug addict and divorcee who was 12 years her senior. He was also the lead singer of the Black Crowes. Her parents must have been thrilled. Did she get married at such a young age, with an American Indian shaman rather than a priest taking the service, as an act of rebellion against her unmarried parents?
"No, I mean between the two of them they were married three times. So they experienced it. I think everyone has that desire to get married. I just met Chris and he was great. As untraditional as he looks, he is a southerner, from Georgia. He has pretty traditional values."
It wasn't exactly a traditional wedding, though. 'No, we mixed it up a bit there. The divorce wasn't very traditional either. But I don't regret that relationship because it gave me my son and, to this day, I have such a deep love for Chris. Just as it takes work to be in a relationship, so it takes work to not be in a relationship. We still disagree, but that person is in my life forever because of Ryder."
Although she was late arriving, Hudson has been generous with her time. She has been more open and much funnier than I had imagined, especially on the subject of trying to keep your children away from Internet porn using reverse psychology: "Maybe we should get all Dutch on them, let them watch whatever they want to watch!"
But it is now time to go and, as we head out, the waiters open doors and call her Miss Hudson. On the carpeted steps of the Beverly Hills Hotel we air-kiss goodbye, but there are no paparazzi to record it. Which, for me at least, is a pity.
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